XenApp administration going mobile

Our Mobile SDK for Windows Apps has been out for a while now, and customers are already using it to mobilize Windows Apps delivered via XenApp/XenDesktop. You might have seen it, but not looked into it as you don’t have any development experience. Well you don’t need to be a developer to try out the Mobile SDK as we have some sample apps for that leverage it.

One of our sample apps is a simple XenApp administration console that provides basic view and control functionality for a XenApp farm. It allows you to view sessions and servers in your XenApp farm. The following screen shot shows the Servers page where you can see summary information for your XenApp servers.

However the app has more than just viewing functionality as you can also reset sessions. By selecting the Sessions tab you can browse and search for sessions in your XenApp farm. By tapping into the search box at the top of the list you can search on the user name, application name and server name. To reset a session simply select it and then press the Reset button in the session details page.

If you want to reset multiple sessions at once you can tap the Edit button to allow multiple selection, select all the sessions you want to reset and the tap the Reset button at the bottom of the session list.

Download and Installation

The XenApp console sample is available for download on Codeplex at the following link:

.NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4.0. While .NET 3.5 is installed by default on Windows 2008 servers, you may not have .NET 4.0 installed.

Once you have downloaded the package off the Codeplex site you will need to unzip the archive and copy the files to a location on the local drive of your XenApp machine – no other special installation steps are required.

Publishing the application requires one special step during the publishing wizard. You must set the “Application Description” to “keywords:mobile”. This is a special keyword that is detected by the Citrix Receiver that is used to configure the session resolution and input mode for mobile applications.

Mobile SDK features used by the XenApp Console

The XenApp console sample shows how you can integrate some simple features from the SDK to make hosted applications highly usable from a mobile device:

DPI scaling. If you’ve published existing Windows apps to mobile devices it is likely that you will have found all the buttons and controls small and hard to click on. By using DPI information from the Mobile SDK, apps can scale themselves so the controls are always the same physical size on different devices.

Keyboard popup. When you tap into the search input text box you will find that the local on screen keyboard pops up automatically, just as you would expect for a native app.

Touch scrolling. You can touch scroll lists and flick them, just as you can with native mobile apps.

Dynamic Layouts. The app supports both a phone and a tablet layout. If you roam the app between different devices it will dynamically adjust its layout to match the device you are using it on. The previous screenshots have been of the tablet layout, the phone layout uses a single column view as shown below:

Get the source

Once you’ve tried the app, if you find your company is interested in creating your own mobilized applications using the Mobile SDK for Windows Apps, you can download the full source for the XenApp console sample off the web. The source code is available from Codeplex under a permissive Apache 2.0 license:

More information

HRP01 on XenApp 6.5 contains the runtime for version 1 of the Mobile SDK. Recently we released version 2 of the SDK in HRP02. The Mobile SDK is available for XenDesktop as well, however only version 1 is presently available. You need to install Feature Pack 1 on XenDesktop 5.6 to access the Mobile SDK runtime. It is installed by default in XenDesktop 7 so no additional installs are required.

One Comment

Great Addition to an IPhone. The only addition request I would ask is to allow you to select which servers to monitor. I image my systems and keep the master image normally in a down state. I get an error message about unable to contact a server and no information from the other servers that are available if my master image is shut down.

Other than that, great app ! Love being able to reset sessions easily.